Ohio and the Future

by Phineas Dash

The Ohio recount is proceeding, and reports are that the bureaucrats are doing their best to subvert it. I learned the ways of petty bureaucrats while serving on the faculty committee on student affairs as a token student representative. They wear you down. They use technicalities when it suits them, and ignore the rules when it suits their purposes. If there is a hue and cry and something gets passed they don’t like, they accept it quietly, and when everybody is exhausted after the fight, they subvert it, then change it back at the next opportunity.

So it goes in Ohio. You expect that from bureaucrats. But there has to be some countervailing power. There are activists there. Apparently some of the Democrats are gaining respect for the sheer stubbornness of the Greens. Greens certainly can be stubborn.

But the activists have lives and eventually they have to earn livings, take finals, feed the baby. The bureaucrats are forever, especially when the Republican fat cats finance them.

Where are the leaders? You might well ask. They are arguing over whether Ohio is worth it. Some say Ohio is the past. It’s time to organize for the future. The real fight is over the party chairperson. Reform in the state parties. The election is so over, so last month. Time to get serious about the nitty gritty, the block chairperson, the state blog.

The conflict is in some ways just the usual reflexive either/or. Some people are appropriately concentrating on organizing for the next elections. They're obsessed with who the next chair of the Democratic party will be. Other people are fighting it out in Ohio, with many supporters obsessed with what's going on there. There's plenty of people to go around.

But there's a more crucial point, and it has many facets. It is this: Ohio is the future.

As someone said in a daily kos diary comment, what's the point of party reform if the votes aren't counted?

There is nothing more important in American politics than the integrity of the vote. It all starts there, it all ends there.

It is a question of justice. It is specifically a question of civil rights, and even more specifically a question of voting rights for African Americans.

At this point I mention for those who don't know it, that although Republican crimes may have been very widespread, at the moment it is particularly clear that it was concentrated in the African American neighborhoods and precincts in Ohio and in Florida, and other less publicized states. That's why you're seeing a black congressman, John Conyers, leading the fight there, and one of the last of the 1960s Civil Rights leaders, Jesse Jackson, who still speaks with the authority of someone who was at Selma, when he says this is the same as Selma.

The Democratic party committed itself to fighting for voting rights for African Americans many years ago, certainly in 1963. It was a political decision, and it was a principled decision. The Kennedys knew that if they supported voting rights, the Democrats would lose the South for a generation or more. They did it anyway.

But if the effort stopped there, it was in vain. If Democrats don't fight for voting rights in 2004, in Ohio, in Florida and elsewhere, then we dishonor our past, we dishonor ourselves, and incidentally, we throttle the future of our party.

I say this as a non-African American Democrat, who as a teenager marched behind Martin Luther King in Washington in 1963. One reason I marched was so that my President would know he had political support to do the right thing. He did.

We keep a focus on Ohio because justice demands it. Injustice in the recent past becomes the cause of the present, and if we don't rise to this occasion, we subvert the future.

We subvert the future in another, very practical way, for those of you who are concerned with the nuts and bolts of the Democratic Party's future. Here in California we begin to see the future that the rest of the country will soon see. There used to be a majority called white. But today there is no majority. And there will be no majority race in America pretty soon.

We are a multiracial society, with a growing number of people who are themselves multiracial. If we can't consciously commit to a common cause of justice regarding African Americans, who have been subject to injustice for most of our history, we aren't going to be ready for that future.

Moreover, if the Democratic party does not aggressively recruit more leaders of many racial backgrounds, we will be a party of only the past.

Ohio is crucial to our credibility as a party, with the African American community and with other communities outside the usual power structures.

It is crucial to the party's credibility with voters of all races who cared so much about this election. I made phone calls as a volunteer for the Kerry campaign, and talked to people in battleground states in every region. People were passionate. They were doing everything they could. They were absolutely determined to have their vote count.

We pay attention to the 2004 vote for the people who stood for five hours in the rain in Florida to vote early. We pay attention to Ohio for the people who stood for ten hours and still didn't get to vote on election day.

We do it for the people who were told at the polls by men in dark suits that Democrats vote on Wednesday, come back then.

We do it for people who don't speak or read English well, but who have the same right to vote, but who were either badly served or more likely, taken advantage of.

We do it because America deserves better than the scandal of a banana republic, where the voting machines are owned and operated by a partisan of the party in power.

We do it because all of this was wrong. And we do it because the people who were determined to vote and were denied, are the future.

And we must do it. I don't know why more prominent Democrats aren't visibly in this fight. I do know the impression it is leaving with people: that the Democrats must have committed just as much fraud as the Republicans, so they are afraid of being exposed if they question what Republicans did.

But as important as celebrity voices these days in capturing media attention, we should not depend on them. We are a little too dependent on daddy. If it's not Daddy Clinton then it's Daddy Kerry. Sometimes I think so many people voted for Bush, not for President (because they would have had to consider competence) but for Daddy.

We don't have any daddy. I admire John Kerry, and I wish he was more visible on this issue, but he seems to feel it isn’t appropriate, or at least not yet. He’s done some things, but some things are never enough. Because one problem with depending on daddy is that daddy can never do enough. If he issues statements of support, then daddy should go to court. If he goes to court, then daddy should go on television.

When we marched on Washington in 1963, JFK and RFK could look out the window and see 300,000 people, and they knew that the world could see them, too. When we marched on the Pentagon in 1968, LBJ ignored us. When we marched on Washington in 1971 behind John Kerry, Nixon circled the school buses around the White House. But in 1963, JFK invited the leaders of the March on Washington into the White House. That was the difference. That was the leadership.

Of course we hope that the efforts in Ohio would lead to a just change in the outcome, because our country's future would immediately be brighter if John Kerry were President. But if this election wasn't stolen, there were serious attempts made to steal it. The crime is in the commission, not in its success.

In 2000 we left it up to daddy to fix the problems before 2004. But our quiet only enticed our cynical adversaries whose only morality is that their side wins.

There’s a march scheduled in New York this weekend. I hope people show up for it, and there are many more. Maybe we should all march to Ohio. Kent State would be a good place to meet.

We have to let them know, we won't be fooled again. That's about the present, and the future.